After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, the crew’s Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just after 8 p.m. ET on Friday.
The four Artemis II astronauts are back safely on Earth after flying around the moon on NASA’s first lunar mission in more than 50 years.
After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in their Orion capsule at 8:07 p.m. ET.
It was a picture-perfect splashdown under three huge parachutes, with the capsule landing upright and bobbing in the water as recovery teams raced to the scene.
Actually I am into space exploration, when it has a scientific purpose, to make us understand the universe better.
I also think the first time NASA put a man on the moon was an achievement, and there were scientific discoveries because of it too.
Bit very obviously doing the same again, can never have the same impact. The money used on this moon trip could have had way bigger scientific impact. This moon trip is a PR stunt, and very little more than that.
A lot of the Apollo program’s control and communications were analog. As you would expect, a lot of that has been switched to digital for the Artemis program. It’s a completely different beast. That requires extensive testing in real world conditions.
The instruments used to measure the moon (and humans after a moon journey) were not as advanced in the 70s as they are now. A lot of data needs to be recollected and reexamined.
Just like a muscle that isn’t flexed, institutional and scientific knowledge is lost if not invoked over time. For example, the technique to make flexible fountain pen nibs has been lost since pre-WW2. Modern fountain pen flex nibs that cost 1k USD to produce are still significantly worse. NASA has been bleeding knowledge for 50+ years. A lot of things now have to be done from scratch.
There are entire generations of aerospace PhDs that never got to use their knowledge, and may not pass on that knowledge if interest in Space exploration keeps dwindling. To them, this has nothing to do with politics. It’s more impressive that they managed to deliver with such a tight budget.
The idea of “putting money towards the biggest scientific impact” is BS. All knowledge is important. We fund history, archeology, sociology (and often not enough) because of this principle. This is why there are researcher unions at universities: you mess with one departments funding, you mess with all our funding.
If the only “scientific discoveries” you can see are the ones literally in front of you, you are not cut out for academic research.